09-08-2004, 08:17 AM
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#1
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Senior Member
Join Date: May 2003
Posts: 3,486
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I found this what Looking up stuff for a differant topic
Quote:
Crime with Legally Owned Machine Guns
In 1995 there were over 240,000 machine guns registered with the BATF. (Zawitz, Marianne,Bureau of Justice Statistics, Guns Used in Crime [PDF].) About half are owned by civilians and the other half by police departments and other governmental agencies (Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York, 1997.)
Since 1934, only one legally owned machine gun has ever been used in crime, and that was a murder committed by a law enforcement officer (as opposed to a civilian). On September 15th, 1988, a 13-year veteran of the Dayton, Ohio police department, Patrolman Roger Waller, then 32, used his fully automatic MAC-11 .380 caliber submachine gun to kill a police informant, 52-year-old Lawrence Hileman. Patrolman Waller pleaded guilty in 1990, and he and an accomplice were sentenced to 18 years in prison. The 1986 'ban' on sales of new machine guns does not apply to purchases by law enforcement or government agencies.
Crime Involving Illegally Owned Machine Guns
Again in Targeting Guns, Kleck writes, four police officers were killed in the line of duty by machine guns from 1983 to 1992. (713 law enforcement officers were killed during that period, 651 with guns.)
In 1980, when Miami's homicide rate was at an all-time high, less than 1% of all homicides involved machine guns. (Miami was supposedly a "machine gun Mecca" and drug trafficking capital of the U.S.) Although there are no national figures to compare to, machine gun deaths were probably lower elsewhere. Kleck cites several examples:
* Of 2,200 guns recovered by Minneapolis police (1987-1989), not one was fully automatic.
* A total of 420 weapons, including 375 guns, were seized during drug warrant executions and arrests by the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad (Will and Grundie counties in the Chicago metropolitan area, 1980-1989). None of the guns was a machine gun.
* 16 of 2,359 (0.7%) of the guns seized in the Detroit area (1991-1992) in connection with "the investigation of narcotics trafficking operations" were machine guns.
A Good Argument for Gun Registration?
An observant reader would think the strict registration requirements and extremely low rates of crime committed with legally owned automatic weapons are powerful arguments for "sensible" gun control. However an even keener reader notices that despite the sterling record of auto-weapons owners for over fifty years, and despite: registration, police approval, state approval, special taxes, waiting periods, and extensive background checks, in 1986, ownership of newly manufactured automatic weapons was prohibited to civilians.
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lol, got to love the law 
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